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Early Childhood programs look to engage the community in making smart choices from Day 1

By Alex Burness

Reporter-Herald Staff Writer

Posted:
02/26/2014 12:48:34 AM MST

Monroe Early Childhood Center students taste chili beans and garbanzo beans Tuesday at the school in Loveland. From left are Jaime DeJesus, 4, Luna Trujillo, 4, and Gracelyn Klaas, 3. They tried lima beans earlier and plan on tasting navy, kidney and black beans soon as part of a program that encourages trying new foods. (Jenny Sparks / Loveland Reporter-Herald)

In his Jan. 28 State of the Union address, President Barack Obama emphasized the value of early childhood education and urged Congress to increase access to high-quality pre-K, which he called "one of the best investments we can make in a child's life."

Theresa Clements, early childhood administrator for Thompson School District, wants to take that idea a step further.

"I'd love there to be an understanding that the importance of quality early education is not just about the academic benefits, but the benefits for lifelong health," she said. "There are so many reasons why we would invest in early childhood, besides just third-grade reading scores."

Those reasons, Clements said, generally fall under three broad categories: language and learning, feeling and behavior, and health and activity. In response, Thompson teamed last year with the Larimer County branches of United Way and Early Childhood Council to launch Be Ready, a campaign aimed at improving school readiness.

"It's really a community campaign," Clements said. "We're not trying to only educate families, but also the entire community. We want Larimer County to be a place where all children can be successful."

Clements' vision, however, requires communities to embrace the notion that a child's learning must begin well before their first day of elementary school.

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"What we've realized is that if we've started in kindergarten, we've started too late," said Anne Warhavor, CEO of the Colorado Health Foundation. "It's just beyond dispute anymore that we have to do a better job from birth. This is really about melding all the experiences of a (newborn) to 3-year-old into trying to create a human being that is really resilient."

Preparing a 1-year-old for school might seem a bit ridiculous, but experts are convinced of its necessity.

For example, Warhover says that a child who's exposed to more than 30,000 different words by age 3 has a much higher chance of future academic success. And in Thompson, preschoolers are now being exposed to foods seldom associated with toddlers.

"They're trying radishes, cous cous, Gouda," Clements said. "The more times kids are exposed to certain foods, they'll eventually try it. It encourages them to eat more fruit and vegetables later on."

The importance of school readiness on health later in life was confirmed by a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) study released in January, and for which Warhover was a co-author. That report cited early childhood education, as well as health-care funding priorities and community revitalization, as the three most important social factors impacting the American medical care system today.

"We cannot improve health by putting more resources into health care alone," said Mark McClellan, the former head of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, and one of the directors of the study. "We must find ways to help more Americans stay healthy and reduce the health care costs that are crowding out other national priorities."

Though there appears to be near consensus in the medical and academic worlds on the importance of early childhood education, securing the funding for it is much trickier.

Research shows that raising an infant or toddler can cost between $8,500 and $14,000 annually in Larimer County. And, as is the case across the state, many Larimer families rely heavily on Colorado Child Care Assistance Program (CCAP) for their children's preschool, as it's the only publicly funded way to get full-day child-care services.

The funding for CCAP in Larimer has been incrementally lowered in the last few years, bottoming out in 2013, with only the poorest eligible families standing to benefit. For lower middle-class families, that often means they miss out completely on CCAP money, even if their need is only a bit smaller than a slightly poorer family's.

"Single parents sometimes have to turn down raises because of that," said Sen. John Kefalas, D-Fort Collins.

Kefalas is helping push several measures that would help fix the CCAP dilemma, one of which would require that families not be dropped automatically from funding after reaching a certain income level. Another would

"It's got to happen at some point," Kefalas said. "The more these children are in an environment where they're stimulated and learning, their chances of success in school will just be much, much greater. If kids are being stimulated and being loved, they will be ready to learn."

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